Taboo – Fallin' Up

2011 • Touchstone

I received this book as a gag gift (on the cheap when Borders went out of business) but I thought I'd read it anyway just for kicks. I've never liked the Black Eyed Peas, but I figured if nothing else it'd be a look into how pop superstars run their music careers, and having heard a few of their songs before I'd at least have a bit of context to work with.

Hence my incredible disappointment when I found out that this book is not about music. At all. I was hoping for at least some discussion of songwriting or production techniques or anything, but no luck. For the purposes of this book the Black Eyes Peas could have been magicians or cabaret dancers or clowns; it wouldn't have made any difference. That leaves the only reason to read this book being if you were really interested in Taboo solely as a person, and I was not—even less so after finishing it, because that guy is an asshole.

The story itself is actually pretty dull; it starts out alright, if in a semi-cliché rags-to-riches ghetto tale, with Taboo rising in the ranks of b-boy dancing; but after he joins his bandmates just a few chapters in he basically rides their coattails the rest of the way. Aside from the copious descriptions of drug and alcohol use, nothing ever really happens to him (nothing interesting, anyway).

And when the partying and drug use is described, it only seems to serve to drive home the book's backwards moral: If you're successful and/or rich, you can get away with anything. There are plenty of cases in the book where this sort of thing happens; the worst offender is probably their trip to St Maarten where several band members and crew are driving drunk and/or high, get pulled over, thrown in jail, and are let go anyway simply because they had a show the next day. A combination of superstar-level fame and incompetent police work results in no consequences and no lessons learned. What's the point?

Yes, he does make a drastic improvement and sobers up at the very end, and supposedly works hard to get there, but it doesn't make me have any more sympathy for someone who has already proven themselves to be an utter asshole for 90% of the book. It all left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Additionally, despite having an editor help him out, the book is very amateurly-written. Its style seems to be some weird hybrid of a newspaper article and a campfire story—half of the paragraphs are one sentence long, making the book read in a very uncomfortable way. The patchwork vocabulary (it's pretty obvious someone broke out a thesaurus at random just to add impressive-sounding long words) and very jumpy storytelling (where the focus switches between events almost at random, perhaps in a ridiculous attempt to keep things chronological) doesn't help at all.

Needless to repeat, I was not remotely impressed by this book and I'm a bit surprised at myself for somehow making it all the way through. It is not even worth digging out of the bargain bin, regardless of how much one likes the Black Eyed Peas (in that case, wait for will.i.am's biography—he's the true hero of the story and seems like the one only deserving of his success).